Freek.dev

Laravel / PHP / AI

Symfony now has an improved dump function original

by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Let's talk a little bit about Symfony's dump function. It's part of their VarDumper component. The function can dump a variable to the screen or browser in a nicer format than PHP's native var_dump. In the recently released Symfony 3.4 and Symfony 4 the function got a nice little improvement that…

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A package to use optimised UUIDs in Laravel

Using regular UUIDs stored as a text-based primary key is very slow. Our newly released package spatie/laravel-binary-uuid aims to solve that by binary storing a slightly tweaked version of the UUID. My colleague Brent wrote a blogpost describing how it works behind the scenes. He also included some interesting benchmarks.

The binary encoding of UUIDs solved most of the issue. There's one extra step to take though, which allows MySQL to even better index this field. By switching some of the bits in the UUID, more specifically time related data, we're able to save them in a more ordered way. And it seems that MySQL is especially fond of ordered data when creating indices.

https://www.stitcher.io/blog/optimised-uuids-in-mysql

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murze.be turns three original

by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

Three years ago I started this blog to share my bookmarks and interesting links with fellow developers. Like on the previous anniversaries I'd like to share some cool statistics from the past 12 months. For the period spanning from end november 2016 until end november 2017 my little blog served 591…

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Native HTML5 form validation in 6 lines of code

Dave Rupert, lead developer at Paravel, shows how you can leverage native form validation and still style your errors using only a couple of lines of JavaScript.

If you’ve ever experimented with HTML5 Form Validation, you’ve probably been disappointed. The out-of-box experience isn’t quite what you want. Adding the required attribute to inputs works wonderfully. However the styling portion with input:invalid sorta sucks because empty inputs are trigger the :invalid state, even before the user has interacted with the page. I finally sat down and spent a couple days trying to make HTML5 Form Validation work the way I want it.

https://daverupert.com/2017/11/happier-html5-forms/

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An approach to testing middleware

Laravel rockstar TJ Miller posted a short and sweet post how how he tested a middleware that forces requests to respond with JSON.

So what I’ve done here is define custom testing routes and applied the middleware as I would use it in the application routes, in this case global middleware and as middleware for the api group. This allows me to assert that the middleware is configured and functioning correctly.

https://medium.com/@sixlive/an-approach-to-testing-middleware-c547fc942848

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How to Read Big Files with PHP (Without Killing Your Server)

In a new blogpost published at Sitepoint, Christopher Pitt explores the various ways you can handle reading big files in PHP.

Though this isn’t a problem we frequently suffer from, it’s easy to mess up when working with large files. In asynchronous applications, it’s just as easy to bring the whole server down when we’re not careful about memory usage.

This tutorial has hopefully introduced you to a few new ideas (or refreshed your memory about them), so that you can think more about how to read and write large files efficiently. When we start to become familiar with streams and generators, and stop using functions like file_get_contents: an entire category of errors disappear from our applications. That seems like a good thing to aim for!

https://www.sitepoint.com/performant-reading-big-files-php/

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Anatomy of a PHP Hack

Aaron Saray recently found some rogue code on a hacked website and investigated what it actually does.

It’s hard to come up with a title for this - but - basically I found some rogue code the other day that I thought was pretty interesting. I was fixing a “hacked” website when I came across the source of the symptoms of the hack.

This obfuscated code is doing something bad, but we don’t know what at first glance. Obviously, the solution is to remove it - but - aren’t you a little curious what it was doing? Let’s take a look.

https://aaronsaray.com/2017/anatomy-of-a-php-hack.html

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The Cost Of JavaScript

Probably you know that that keeping the disk & transfer size of a JavaScript file low is pretty important. But have you considered the time needed to parse and compile the code? In this great post on Medium Addy Osmani, an engineer at Google, explains the complete cost of having JavaScript on your page.

As we build sites more heavily reliant on JavaScript, we sometimes pay for what we send down in ways that we can’t always easily see. In this post, I’ll cover why a little discipline can help if you’d like your site to load & be interactive quickly on mobile devices. tl;dr: less code = less parse/compile + less transfer + less to decompress

https://medium.com/dev-channel/the-cost-of-javascript-84009f51e99e

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Reducing the size of a css file original

by Freek Van der Herten – 2 minute read

PurgeCSS is a tool that can reduce the filesize of a CSS file. It does this by removing any css classes that are not used. It can detect which CSS classes are used by scanning the source files of your application. In this tweet Jonathan Reinink shared how it can be configured in Laravel Mix: ???? I…

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On migrating my blog from WordPress to a Laravel application original

by Freek Van der Herten – 12 minute read

Regular visitors will have noticed that last week this blog got a new coat of paint. This new layout isn't just a new WordPress theme. Things have changed on the backend as well. Previously my blog was powered by WordPress. I've migrated it to a custom built Laravel app. That app is open sourced.…

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Redesigning Laravel.io

In this blogpost by Tailwind CSS co-creators Adam Wathan and Steve Schoger share lots of actionable tips to improve the layout of your site.

Laravel.io is a forum and community portal for developers who use the Laravel PHP framework.

They recently launched a brand new version of the site, but being a volunteer-driven open source project, finding the resources to put together a really polished design can be tough.

We asked and got the go ahead to try our hands at a bit of a facelift, so let’s see what we can do to take the UI up a notch!

https://medium.com/refactoring-ui/redesigning-laravel-io-c47ac495dff0

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